8GB SSD or 120GB Hard Drive

The biggest question will be why only get the 8GB SSD when for another £5 - £10 you can get the *120GB hard drive model?

Well there is good and bad points to both options:

SSD Option (solid-state drive)
Very fast
Shock proof - as no moving parts
Lighter Laptop
No noise
Only 8GB SSD do not last for ever but do last quite a while, if using Windows XP I would recommend disabling pre-fetching, not doing this will wear down the memory chip on the SSD being rewritten over and over.
Possible file corruption (highly unlikely but can happen if data is being written during a power cut)
Battery will last longer using SSD

Hard Drive Option
*120GB of storage vs 8GB (plenty of space for storing movies etc.. for viewing)
Reliable (its been used worldwide for years in laptops and PCs)
Not shock proof
Good speed (unknown rpm as of yet, I would expect 5400rpm with SATA connection)
Battery will drain quicker using a standard hard drive
Slightly heavier
Some noise during data access

 

I thought the HDD was going to be 80GB.

Either way, I vote SSD for all the reasons you mentioned. I hope CCL get their stock in soon, I can't wait.

 

As soon as the Aspire one becomes available I hope there will be benchmark comparisons between both models ( the recently released linux Phoronix Test Suite could be very useful ). I think the performance difference really depends on the quality of the shipped ssd drives..

 

8 GB SSD.

 

As well as being heavier, is the chassis for the HDD version also slightly larger? (I think I read it's a little thicker and longer, width is still the same).

Anyway, I think I'll be getting the SSD version and getting a 16 SDHC card (Play have one for about £35), which is more than enough for my needs. I've got 1.5TB of space on my desktop for any other needs

 

I'm still not entirely sure which one I'll be getting. I've heard plenty of good and bad about SSD's. It looks like most of the good has already been mentioned, but as for some more bad that you may want to be aware of if you're not already, with a SSD you can only write/erase it a limited number of times. At this time it's up to something around 100k-200k, so it isn't a huge issue, but still something to be aware of. There's a chart and more details on another forum: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ssd_write_limit
If it's written on evenly, depending on how much you use it this should last several years and hopefully longer than most plan on using this system. However it isn't always written on completely evenly so you may lose some memory after a year or so (and with only 8GB I would think this is something to worry about).
Also, I've heard something about SSD's not reacting well to magnets (though I think it's already a general rule to keep magnets away from computers anyways).
Just some more stuff to consider. I think for me it might come down to cost for which i get, though if the HDD version chassis is bigger this may also be a deciding factor (can anyone confirm whether or not this is true?).

 

Most modern flash controllers use wear levelling and while I am not absolutely sure that this is the case with the One, it seems very likely. It is also the case that when a cell eventually dies, the controller just remaps the memory so you won't see much of a reduction. I really don't think this is much of an issue. The only real benefit of an HDD is size where there is a BIG difference.

 

It isn't a huge issue, granted, because there is some leveling, but the leveling hasn't been perfected (nor am I sure if it's possible to perfect it completely). At this point I'm pretty sure where it's least reliable is with lots of small writes (which I'm assuming most people would use it for). Really I'm just not entirely sure just yet if I want to get it before it's perfected a little more (though it has come a long way), especially with a lot more memory on the HDD. The HDD may still be the most common thing to fail in a computer due to the fact that its a mechanical device, but after so many years perfecting it it has become pretty reliable. I really am liking the startup time with the SSD though, as well as the silence.

 

get the 120gb the SSD is really slow check read/write speeds under software windows

 

Any information on how fast/slow it is under Linux? Slow under Windows... maybe a driver issue?

 

More likely cheap SSD hardware, but I'd be interested to hear some more empirical data, especially on Linux.

 

I thought about a driver issue but I had everything installed. And the drive shows as P-SSD1800, I found out it is a samsung chip...

 

I heard 7.7 Mbps for the SSD write speed with Linux...which is really poor. The read speed I've heard is 26 Mbps, which is acceptable at least.
I don't know the speeds for the HDD, but it doesn't sound like the SSD will be much faster. I'm thinking the HDD is gonna be the way to go...not to mention the much bigger capacity there. Just don't drop it and you've got nothing to lose besides maybe a few seconds on the startup time and maybe like 10 minutes of battery power.

 

After reading the same thing on Golem.de about the dismal write-speed, my enthusiasm for the Aspire One has vanished. Why did Acer go ultra-cheap and handicap the machine?

I don't want a regular HDD. I want to be able to throw around my machine and lift it up with one hand and not worry about goddamn disk heads crashing. Guess I will stick to my Asus Eee for now.

Here is the relevant link (german text from Golem.de translated by Google)
http://66.102.9.104/translate_c?hl=en&s ... KCMqP2NDXw

 

I have Just finished the test:

Under Windows with 512mb ram :
Sequential Read: 29.04 MB/s Sequential write 7,78 MB/S
512k Read: 29,09 512k Write 1,6 Mb/S
4k Read: 5,5 Mb/s 4k write: 0,020 MB/s

Now i try to enlarge the packet.

 

With a test of 500mb of transfer file in sequential read i have the same result, in sequential write 10,24 Mb/s, so better than 7,7

 

With another benchmark test i have 24,5 of the best transfer rate value.

Now i'm adding 512 mb ram. Then i re-do the test

 

Now with 1,5 gb ram the system is more fast but not a flash

The write /read speed is the same.

 

Thanks for your tests Flaterik. Very sad SSD write speeds.

 

I think that the better solution for the ssd is to use Linux.